Program crashes only in Release mode outside debugger

Question

I have quite massive program (>10k lines of C++ code). It works perfectly in debug mode or in release mode when launched from within Visual Studio, but the release mode binary usually crashes when launched manually from the command line (not always!!!).

The line with delete causes the crash:

bool Save(const short* data, unsigned int width, unsigned int height, 
          const wstring* implicit_path, const wstring* name = NULL, 
          bool enable_overlay = false)
{
    char* buf = new char[17];
    delete [] buf;
}

EDIT: Upon request expanded the example.

The "len" has length 16 in my test case. It doesn't matter, if I do something with the buf or not, it crashes on the delete.

EDIT: The application works fine without the delete [] line, but I suppose it leaks memory then (since the block is never unallocated). The buf in never used after the delete line. It also seems it does not crash with any other type than char. Now I am really confused.

The crash message is very unspecific (typical Windows "xyz.exe has stopped working"). When I click the "Debug the program" option, it enters VS, where the error is specified to be "Access violation writing location xxxxxxxx". It is unable to locate the place of the error though "No symbols were loaded for any stack frame".

I guess it is some pretty serious case of heap corruption, but how to debug this? What should I look for?

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

have you checked memory leaks elsewhere?

usually weird delete behavior is caused by the heap getting corrupted at one point, then much much later on, it becomes apparent because of another heap usage.

The difference between debug and release can be caused by the way windows allocate the heap in each context. For example in debug, the heap can be very sparse and the corruption doesn't affect anything right away.

Answer 2

The biggest difference between launched in debugger and launched on its own is that when an application is lunched from the debugger Windows provides a "debug heap", that is filled with the 0xBAADF00D pattern; note that this is not the debug heap provided by the CRT, which instead is filled with the 0xCD pattern (IIRC).

Here is one of the few mentions that Microsoft makes about this feature, and here you can find some links about it.

Also mentioned in that link is "starting a program and attaching to it with a debugger does NOT cause it to use the "special debug heap" to be used."

Answer 3

You probably have a memory overwrite somewhere and the delete[] is simply the first time it causes a problem. But the overwrite itself can be located in a totally different part of your program. The difficulty is finding the overwrite.

Add the following function

#include <malloc.h>

#define CHKHEAP()  (check_heap(__FILE__, __LINE__))

void check_heap(char *file, int line)
{
    static char *lastOkFile = "here";
    static int lastOkLine = 0;
    static int heapOK = 1;

    if (!heapOK) return;

    if (_heapchk() == _HEAPOK)
    {
        lastOkFile = file;
        lastOkLine = line;
       return;
    }

    heapOK = 0;
    printf("Heap corruption detected at %s (%d)\n", file, line);
    printf("Last OK at %s (%d)\n", lastOkFile, lastOkLine);
}

Now call CHKHEAP() frequently throughout your program and run again. It should show you the source file and line where the heap becomes corrupted and where it was OK for the last time.

Answer 4

There are many possible causes of crashes. It's always difficult to locate them, especially when they differ from debug to release mode.

On the other hand, since you are using C++ , you could get away by using a std::string instead of a manually allocated buffer >> there is a reason for which RAII exists ;)

Answer 5

One type of problem I had when I observed this symptom is that I had a multi-process program crash on me when run in shell, but ran flawlessly when called from valgrind or gdb . I discovered (much to my embarrassment), that I had a few stray processes of the same program still running in the system, causing a mq_send() call to return with error. The problem was that those stray processes were also assigned the message queue handle by the kernel/system and so the mq_send() in my newly spawned process(es) failed, but undeterministically (per the kernel scheduling circumstances).

Like I said, trivial, but until you find it out, you'll tear your hair out!

I learnt from this hard lesson, and my Makefile these days has all the appropriate commands to create a new build, and cleanup the old environment (including tearing down old message queues and shared memory and semaphores and such). This way, I don't forget to do something and have to get heartburn over a seemingly difficult (but clearly trivially solvable) problem. Here is a cut-and-paste from my latest project:

[Makefile]
all:
      ...
...

obj:
      ...
clean:
      ...
prep:
  @echo "\n!! ATTENTION !!!\n\n"
  @echo "First: Create and mount mqueues onto /dev/mqueue (Change for non ubuntu)"
  rm -rf /run/shm/*Pool /run/shm/sem.*;
  rm -rf /dev/mqueue/Test;
  rm -rf /dev/mqueue/*Task;
  killall multiProcessProject || true;

Answer 6

These two are the first two lines in their function.

If you really mean that the way I interpret it, then the first line is declaring a local variable buf in one function, but the delete is deleting some different buf declared outside the second function.

Maybe you should show the two functions.

Answer 7

Have you tried simply isolating this with the same build file but code based just on what you've put above? Something like:

int main(int argc, char* argv[] )
{
    const int len( 16 );
    char* buf = new char[len + 1]; 

    delete [] buf;
}

The code you've given is absolutely fine and, on it's own, should run with no problems either in debug or optimised. So if the problem isn't down to specifics of your code, then it must be down to specifics of the project (ie compilation / linkage)

Have you tried creating a brand new project and placing the 10K+ lines of C++ into it? Might not take too long to prove the point. Especially if the existing project has either been imported in or heavily altered.

Answer 8

It sounds like you have an unitialised variable somewhere in the code.

In debug mode all the memory is initialised to somthing standard so you will get consistant behavior.

In release mode the memory is not initialised unless you explicitly do somthing.

Run your compiler with the warnings set at the highest level possable.
Then make sure you code compiles with no warnings.

Answer 9

I was having the same issue, and I figured out that my program was only crashing when I went to delete[] char pointers with a string length of 1.

void DeleteCharArray(char* array){
 if(strlen(array)>1){delete [] array;}
 else{delete array;}
}

This fixed the issue, but it is still error prone, but could be modified to be otherwise. Anyhow the reason this happens I suspect is that to C++ char* str=new char[1] and char* str=new char; are the same thing, and that means that when you're trying to delete a pointer with delete[] which is made for arrays only then results are unexpected, and often fatal.